Blackbaud named a top U.S. small business

Large by Charleston’s business standards, Blackbaud Inc. can count itself among the nation’s top small employers.

The Daniel Island-based software developer was ranked No. 54 on Forbes’ newly published top 100 Best Small Companies in America.

The magazine said the purpose of the list was to identify U.S. businesses “with remarkable sales and earning growth.”

Blackbaud went public in July 2004.

The Forbes list was limited to publicly traded corporations with annual revenue between $5 million and $1 billion and stocks that trade in excess of $5 a share. The 100 top performers were picked by a panel of six expert investors in small capitalization companies.

“They hire, innovate and defy the downturn,” Forbes noted.

Blackbaud is viewed as the 800-pound gorilla in its corner of the jungle: providing software and services that enable nonprofit organizations to raise money more effectively.

In September, Software Magazine ranked the company as No. 121 on its annual Software 500 list of the world’s largest software and service providers.

More recently Blackbaud acquired a company that operates the world’s largest searchable database of philanthropic data, adding a new service. Santa Barbara, Calif.-based NOZA sells data it collects to nonprofit groups to help them identify future donor prospects.

Blackbaud has roughly 24,000 customers in 83 countries and racked up sales of $309 million last year. Its 2 percent year-over-year revenue growth came despite the fact that many of its clients’ technology budgets had been ravaged by the recession.

Investors will find out how the region’s most prominent homegrown tech business fared in the July-September period late Tuesday afternoon, when Blackbaud releases its third-quarter financials.